This week on my podcast, I read "Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet," my recent @medium column about building a better internet:
https://doctorow.medium.com/enshitternet-c1d4252e5c6b
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/22/the-new-good-internet/#the-old-good-internet
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As #JohnHodgman is fond of reminding us, "#nostalgia is a toxic impulse." It is easy for an old net.hand like me to fall into the trap of shaking his fist at the #cloud. Having been on the other side of that dynamic, I can tell you it's no fun.
When I got on #BBSes in the early 1980s, there was an omnipresent chorus of grumps insisting that the move from honest acoustic couplers to decadent #modems was the end of the Golden Age of telecommunications:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
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When I got on #Usenet shortly thereafter, the Unix Greybeard set never passed up an opportunity to tell us newcomers that the #Fidonet-Usenet bridge allowed the barbarian hordes to overwhelm their Athenian marketplace of ideas:
https://technicshistory.com/2020/06/25/the-era-of-fragmentation-part-4-the-anarchists/
When I joined #TheWELL in the late 1980s, I was repeatedly assured that the good times were over, and that we would never see their like again:
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Now that I'm 52, I've learned to recognize this dynamic, from the #EternalSeptember:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
to the moral panic over menuing systems replacing CLIs:
to the culture wars over what would happen when the net got a normie-friendly GUI:
https://www.dejavu.org/1993win.htm
And yeah, I've done it too, explaining "Why I won’t buy an #iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)":
https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/
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But there's a key difference between my own warnings about the #enshittification that new "user friendly" technologies would engender and all those other AARP members' complaints: they were wrong, and I was right.
As @tveastman reminded us, the internet really *was* better, back before it became "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text of the other four":
https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
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The underlying pathology of that enshittification wasn't the UI, or whether it involved an app store. As the #Luddites knew, the important thing about a technology isn't what it *does*, but who it does it *for* and who it does it *to*:
https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/
The problem wasn't which technology we used. There is nothing inherent about touchscreens that makes them into prisons that trap users, rather than walled gardens that protect them.
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Likewise, the problem wasn't who made that tech. We didn't swap wise UUCP Monks for venal tech bros. Early tech was full of public-spirited sysops, but it was also full of would-be monopolists who tried - and failed - to get us to "stop talking to each other and start buying things":
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
If it wasn't the technology that killed the old, good internet, and if it wasn't the people who killed the old, good internet, where did the #enshitternet come from?
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It wasn't the wrong tech, it wasn't the wrong people: it was the wrong *rules*. After all, the Apple ][+ went on sale the year #RonaldReagan hit the campaign trail. Consumer tech was the first industry born after #antitrust was dismantled, and it created the modern monopoly playbook: buying and merging with competitors. The resulting unity of purpose and anticompetitive profit margins allowed tech to capture its regulators and secure favorable court and legislative outcomes.
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The simultaneous drawdown of antitrust enforcement and growth of tech meant that tech's long-standing cycle of renewal was ended. Tech companies that owed their existence to their ability to reverse-engineer incumbent companies' products and make #interoperable replacements and add-ons were able to ban anyone else from doing unto them as they did unto the giants that came before them:
https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980
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The pirates became admirals, and set about creating a "#FelonyContemptOfBusinessModel":
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/painful-burning-dribble/#law-of-intended-consequences
They changed the rules to ensure that they could "disrupt" anyone they chose, but could themselves mobilize the full might of the US government to prevent anyone from disrupting *them*:
https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/
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The old, good internet was the net we made while tech was still realizing the new anticompetitive powers it had at its disposal, and it disappeared because every administration, R and D, from Reagan to Trump, yanked more Jenga blocks out of the antitrust tower.
In other words: the old, good internet was always doomed, because it was being frantically built in an contracting zone of #FreedomToTinker, where technologies could be operated by and for the people who used them.
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Today, the #Biden administration has ushered in a new era of antitrust renewal, planting the seeds of a #disenshittification movement that will tame corporate power rather than nurturing it:
https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby
In other words, we are living in the first days of a better nation.
In other words, rather than restoring the old, good internet, we should build a *#NewGoodInternet*.
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President Biden’s July 9 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is a highly technical, 72-part, fine-grained memo on how to address the ways market concentration harms our lives as workers, citizens, consumers, and beyond. To a casual reader, this may seem like a dry bit...
What is a new, good internet? It's an internet where it's legal to:
* reverse-engineer the products and services you use, to add interoperability to them so you can leave a social network without leaving your friends:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
* jailbreak devices to remove #antifeatures, like #surveillance, ink-locking, or #repair-blocking:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/17/have-you-tried-not-spying/#coppa
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In this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use social media in the near future, after big companies...
* move your media files and apps from any platform to any device or service, even if the company that sold them to you objects:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate
A new, good internet gives powers to users, and takes power away from corporations:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
On a new, good internet, companies can't practice #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
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They can't turn search into an auction between companies that match your query and companies that want to sell you fakes and knockoffs:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
They can't charge rent to the people whose feeds you asked to read for the privilege of reaching you:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen
In fact, a new, good internet is one where we #EuthanizeRentiers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
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On the new good internet, your boss can't use #bossware to turn #WorkFromHome into #LiveAtWork:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware
And on top of that, you have the right to hack that bossware to undetectably disable it (and hackers have the right to sell or give you that hack):
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition
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On the new, good internet, we stop pretending that tech is stealing content from news companies, and focus on how tech steals *money* from the news, with app taxes, rigged ad markets, surveillance ads, and payola:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
The new, good internet is an internet where we #SeizeTheMeansOfComputation. It's an internet operated by and for the people who use it.
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Download this whole series as a single PDF.Media is in crisis: newsrooms all over the world are shuttering and the very profession of journalism is under sustained ideological and physical assault. Freedom of the press is a hollow doctrine if the only news media is written or published by...
Hodgman is right. Nostalgia *is* a toxic impulse. The point of making a new, good internet isn't to revive the old, good internet. There were plenty of problems with the old, good internet. The point is to make a new, good internet that is the worthy successor to the old, good internet - and to consign the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, an unfortunate transitional stage between one good internet and another.
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Here's a link to the podcast episode:
and here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @internetarchive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_448/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_448_-_Enshitternet.mp3
and here's a link to my podcast's RSS feed:
https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
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Cryteria (modified)
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Cory Doctorow
